Hi everyone - I’m Ali, Co-Founder and Co-CEO of Jane.
I’m coming here to share some background into the new mobile app you can offer to your clients or patients.
If you’re one of our Canadian customers, you would have received an email the week of Feb 17th announcing the full release of the Jane Client app on the Canadian Apple and Google Play app stores.
We have been working with many of you over the last few months, while the app was in a Beta period, to ensure we heard your feedback during the development process, and now, Jane’s Mobile App for Clients is publicly available! (In Canada… We’re working on the release for US and rest of world 🌎❤️).
I thought it could be helpful to share more about why I’m so excited about this release!
Here’s the TL;DR for those of you between clients, and I’ll add the full novella of details below if you’re interested in the long form journey:
Benefits for your Clients
- Consolidates to a single login if they visit many practices running with Jane
- Makes re-booking with existing practitioners 75% faster
Benefits for you as Practitioners/Business Owners
- Makes re-booking with existing practitioners 75% faster (yes that’s supposed to be in both sections!)
- Reduces duplicate profiles being created in your account
- Opens up a path for Jane to deliver several highly requested features around client messaging in a delightful and compliant way
Here’s the long version of why I’m excited about it for you and your clients.
For Clients:
When Trevor and I first started Jane, we hadn’t anticipated that clients would end up using Jane at so many different types of practices. They might have a Chiropractor, a Physio, a Massage Therapist, a Counsellor, an Acupuncturist and a practice they use for Botox, all with different usernames and logins. Clients have been clear with us that this is confusing to manage and that they don’t understand why they need to keep creating new logins.
If you yourself are a client of other Jane clinics as well as a practitioner using Jane to run your practice, you might have this pain point yourself!
For Practices:
While I love this solve for clients, our mission is to Help the Helpers. And I think that if you haven’t used the app as a client yourself, the value for you could be less obvious.
1. The app is designed to make re-booking with your existing practitioners easier.
To set up the app, your client will search for your practice, then enter their existing username and password to link the app to their profile.
Once linked, the main page will show a list of upcoming appointments, if any have been scheduled.
The second tab offers a “book” option, where they will see only the practices they have manually linked to the app, and the practitioners from these practices with whom they have had an appointment in the last 6 months. Clicking on either a practitioner or the practice will offer a rapid re-booking flow.
This is the main focus of the current version of the client app. That simplifying the re-booking flow for your clients will result in more booked appointments for you and your practice.
Once your client links your practice to the app, they can open the app using face ID, immediately choose your tile as one of their existing care providers, access your booking page, and book a visit. 75% less steps than before!
2. Reduce duplicate profiles
Whenever I see a support email mentioning “missing charts” “deleted data” “client login problems” - I usually just sigh and say “Duplicate Profile”.
Moving forward, we’re hoping that this app will help reduce the myriad of ways people login, by simplifying the process. When a client links their existing profile, the app isn’t creating a NEW profile, it is just linking the current profile to the app for better booking.
Duplicate logins currently happen when people can’t remember how they logged in the first time and then create another profile using a different email, or by using a social log in. With the app, they don’t need to remember all their different log ins - they just need one. Or actually, they just need their face. With FaceID they actually don’t need to remember any!
3. Prepping for Client/Practice Communication Improvements
Beyond this first step, there are plans for a lot of more exciting features for the client app.
Our most common feature requests from the Jane Customer Community are all around Client Messaging: Two-way admin messaging; Secure Clinical Messaging; Notifying all current clients of an important change or update; No Show messages; Prompt Client to Update Credit Card when it’s nearing Expiry; Client Document Uploads.
All of this becomes much easier to offer with a mobile app for clients. Why?
A mobile app allows Jane to develop messaging in two important ways:
- We can keep all messaging within Jane’s secure environment, allowing us to develop features that expand on how you can talk to your clients in a HIPAA and PIPEDA compliant way.
- We can also develop features using “push notifications” - which means we can price new messaging features more competitively and won’t have to start the standard practice of charging for “SMS credits” to control those SMS costs.
Let me explain why:
- SMS messages are not HIPAA or PIPEDA compliant
First of all, and possibly actually most importantly - SMS messages are not considered secure for the transmission of Personal Health Information. This means that secure messaging in healthcare is often a ridiculous feeling jump around - where you get a text message saying “you have a message” and then you get launched to a login page where you have to remember your login info to access a page where your message is waiting. It’s… not delightful. A mobile app that lives in Jane’s secure environment opens up a whole new world for how we can build features that allows actually delightful secure messaging.
- SMS messages are expensive to send
One of the other problems with client messaging is that using typical “text” or SMS messages means Jane would have to start charging for SMS credits. This is a somewhat frustrating style of usage based credits where software providers charge for a “Bundle” of credits and you work that down as you send messages.
Jane is already unusual in that our text reminders are free of charge. Most other software providers charge for text reminders because there’s a cost associated to sending every text message. In 2024, it cost Jane $1.7 Million Dollars for all the text messages our Customers sent (!) I often mention to our team that since Jane charges an average subscription fee of less than $100/mo, we need to be thoughtful about how we spend our money as a company. The cost to deliver text messages puts friction into our ability to develop all the amazing client communication features we want to offer.
Summary
If you’re still with me - thanks for joining me as I share some of the things I think are really going to make your life as a Small Healthcare Business easier and a lot of the thinking behind the current and future plans for the Jane Client App.
Our mission is to Help the Helpers. And I’m proud to offer this client app as part of our ongoing goal of making it easier to run your practices.
This is an app for you to offer your clients if you think it is helpful.
We are letting our Canadian practices know about the app, and you’re free to share it with your clients if you want to offer them a simpler way to manage and book their appointments with you. Even if your client isn’t visiting multiple Jane practices, the mobile re-booking flow is so much better I think you’ll see instant value through increased re-bookings.
I’m always interested to hear if Jane’s fulfilling our Mission of helping (you) the helpers, and if we’re doing so through our Brand Promise of doing that in a Human, Helpful and Delightful way.
So if you have any questions or comments, we’d love to hear from you.
-Ali